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12/02/2014

The Musketeers - The Good Soldier

BBC1
09/02/14
written by Adrian Hodges
directed by Richard Clark

The Duke
of Savoy – married to the king’s sister- arrives to sign a treaty but the
Musketeers have a personal stake in a massacre that happened five years ago
involving Savoy- and possibly Captain Treville.

There’s an unwritten tv series out there somewhere set amongst the espionage of
the seventeenth century. Without modern accoutrements it would be far more
difficult to write than something like Spooks but this episode
demonstrates the rewards of such diligence. Adrian Hodges weaves an absorbing
tale centred on a massacre of a dozen musketeers that occurred five years
earlier and to which Aramis was a witness. Another survivor Marsac has
arrived to try and kill the Duke whom he blames for what happened but it soon
transpires that someone inside the Musketeers’ circle provided information as
to the party’s location and a lie as to their intent. If the result
occasionally teeters on the brink of melodrama, Hodges has thought through his
story to make it intriguing to the end. The series’ already familiar signature
speed stops things from getting bogged down while the writer leaves us guessing
till the last possible moment as to Treville’s complicity.

"Your majesty, I'd like some time off to go and find Gallifrey" "Shut up Billy Connolly"

With this
sort of plot there’s a lot of court protocol and diplomatic stuff but it
sits easily thanks to the action that punctuates it and also what is at stake
on a personal level. Aramis’ involvement is what ignites the story. It seems
the team are focussing on one of the Musketeers each week and you can forgive
the similarity of a plot that revolves around events in the past because it
gives the group a history.
Some of the cast who have hitherto been left in the background a bit get to
shine here, Santiago Carbrera’s usually unruffled Aramis shows his passion for
the truth while the hitherto procedural Captain Treville is unchained for the
first time giving Hugo Speer something to get his teeth into. It’s Peter
Capaldi’s best episode so far as Richelieu snakes his way around the situation
with a threatening look here and a cutting aside there. Both Vincent Regan and
JJ Field (channelling Tom Hiddleston’s Loki) gives strong performance as the
arrogant Savoy and Marsac respectively.
As ever the show looks fantastic, shot outdoors through a haze of sun and mist
whilst there’s a suitable grimy pallor for the scenes in the underground
prison. Director Richard Clark gets us right into the middle of fight scenes
and uses the lavish location more than previous episodes have done. The only
slight niggle is that D'Artagnan seems to have become part of the
Musketeers very quickly when there is surely fun and action to be had as he
tries to win his spurs. It is occasionally mentioned but then we see in this
episode for example he takes his place guarding the King. I wonder what
all the other musketeers do?
It’s hard to see why the ratings are slipping, though the redoubtable Mr Selfridge may have something to do
with it. In fact is there any other programme that has so much to compete with
as Channel 4 started Babylon this
week while BBC2 has new Dragon’s Den.
This is another assured, exciting episode of the sort you wouldn’t expect so
soon in a series’ run. In fact the only disappointment is that we have to wait
two weeks for episode 5.